We have a fairly large number of laptops in our school districts. Because laptops are so portable, we’ve had our fair share of them stolen over the years. There are a number of products that can be purchased and installed on the laptop that make it easier to recover them if they get stolen. One that comes to mind is a piece of software called MacPhoneHome. While I’ve looked at these two products and believe they are quite good, they aren’t cheap when you look at rolling it out to hundreds of laptops.

Tonight I’ve been researching ways to accomplish something similar using the tools that are built right in to Mac OS X. I’ve found a couple of interesting leads and plan to explore this further in the coming days. Mac OS X Hints has a particular interesting set of hints in this post. Once I’ve tested a few of these ideas, I’ll be sure and post again with more information.

–Pete